Reported Missing: A gripping psychological thriller with a breath-taking twist Read online

  Reported Missing

  A Gripping Psychological thriller with a Breathtaking Twist

  Sarah Wray

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  A Note from Sarah

  Prologue

  ‘There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.’ I read that somewhere once, or a version of it anyway. Now, it keeps washing up into my mind.

  Maybe I chose to ignore some of the signs with Chris, maybe they were never there. Everything is distorted through the prism of Kayleigh’s disappearance. It’s like reading a book backwards.

  But now I have to decide how to think of us from here, which memories to keep and the ones to push aside.

  One

  Thursday, 5 November

  I am suddenly awake and upright, groggy from the red wine and sleeping pill. It’s nothing, I tell myself. Just the wind. I begin to relax, remembering that it’s Bonfire Night. It’s just fireworks in the distance. The banging and explosions must have woken me.

  I start to relax again, then my whole body stiffens. There are voices outside, whispers, low murmurs – close to the caravan. I strain to hear. The dread in my chest is like setting concrete. A click against the window, then another... stones.

  Not again, please not again.

  A thud against the side of the caravan, followed by another. Everything shakes, glasses rattling. They’re going to tip it over. I panic, run to the door and throw it open, a rush of cold air. It’s pitch-dark but I sense people scattering in what seems like all directions.

  How many are there?

  A hissing, then something screams past my ear. A loud crack to my right and an explosion of light, a smell of burning. A firework. Panicked, I think of the gas bottles. But it whistles back into the sky and arcs away again. My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and I stamp out the embers on the damp grass, smoke catching in my throat. Something sharp whips across my cheek and stings. I raise my hand to my face and it’s wet, blood.

  ‘That’s for your pervert husband and what he done to Kayleigh!’ a girl’s voice shouts. I can’t tell where she is or how close.

  I turn to go back into the caravan, and another pebble smacks against the side of it, bouncing off. Someone is flicking a lighter on and off but I still can’t see who’s there.

  They came to the house before I moved out, but how did they find out I’m here?

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  A voice from the other side. ‘Where’s Kayleigh? Where’s he taken her?’

  Rhythmic clapping, a football chant. ‘Where’s your husband, where’s your husband, where’s your husband?’

  ‘You must be too old for him, love. Heard he prefers them young!’ Sniggers.

  ‘Oi!’ The girl’s voice appears from around the side of the caravan. Something lit is hurtling towards me. It hits the step just in front of my feet, a sharp bang, a ball of blue light. Speeding streams of coloured light fly past my face, leaving a blurred trail behind them.

  I just see limbs and bobbing heads, then dark shapes running away towards the park entrance.

  I go back inside and lock the door. Knees puIled up to my chest, I sit in the caravan in the dark, shivering, my heart thumping, for what seems like hours. I can’t calm down. Things have been quieter recently. Why again now, all of a sudden? I think back to earlier this evening; a phone call. Silence, breathing. Wrong number, I tried to tell myself. But it was like before, when it first happened.

  I check the doors and windows one last time. I keep the lights out to hide any silhouette and push a chair in front of the door with cups and saucers crowded on the seat. Above each window, I carefully balance knives and spoons. Should anyone come back, I need to know straight away. I am ready.

  Finally, after this procedure is complete, I can rest a little easier, at least enough to just lie here in some sort of peace. The world always feels like it’s swimming slightly these days, my eyes are gritty and hot at the rims. Despite its dingy furnishings – the faded, garish cushion coverings and the stark little gas fire, there’s something about life in the caravan that is soothing; it’s like playing shops or post office as a child. The compact space and the dual-purpose furniture are comforting, the smaller versions of chairs and appliances.

  I had felt safer here. And it is too painful to be at the house, the credit-card promotions and pizza offers still arriving with his name on, his acoustic guitar propped against the wall.

  When I block out for the briefest moments why I ended up here, I have a fleeting feeling of serenity. Then it slams back in, I'm falling asleep, then I'm tripping over and falling off the cliffs, awake.

  He is still gone. Chris, my husband. Almost four months now. 112 days.

  I rearrange the crockery on the chair once more, making sure it clatters if I nudge the chair even slightly. I pour myself half a mug of vodka, pull on my woolly hat and crawl under the covers, shivering. I have to remove a glove; the phone requires a human touch. Then there he is, warm and alive, lying out on a picnic rug, squinting from the sun, pushing the camera away with mock coyness. I play the video again.

  Two

  Friday, 6 November

  After what feels like just a few short hours’ fitful sleep, I wake and push the curtain back, wiping condensation away with the bottom of my fist. My mouth is dry and foisty. I didn’t mean to drink so much again last night.

  It’s a blustery, wet day, the windows lashed with rain as I look across the deserted caravan park, the pavements darkened and the grass sodden. A figure in a raincoat dashes past, holding their hood up.

  I am glad I don’t have to go into work anymore, but especially on days like this. In recent weeks I have barely left the cocoon of the caravan, living on toast and powdered soup. Until the booze runs out. Then I am lured out again.

  As I make coffee, I flick on the TV to break the silence. The weather report, an advert for a kitchen chopping-and-blending device, trying to be too American, breakfast TV. A flicky-haired woman, blank-faced and waxy with foundation, stares, forced sincerity, into the camera. She’ll be back after the break to talk about the rise in testicular cancer and to meet Tim, diagnosed with an aggressive strain of the disease. She’ll also be looking at a preview of spring fashion.

  The TV clock says it’s 8 a.m. and the familiar lilting newsreader announces, even-voiced, there’s been another suicide bombing at a market in Iraq. Ther
e could be snow this week, probably in Scotland. The pound has fallen against the dollar. What does that even mean anyway?

  I used to find daytime TV depressing – all the payday loan adverts and property shows. How many people who are at home all day are in a position to be inspired by a property development programme? Unemployed people, new mums, elderly people like Mum? I used to moan to Chris about the staff at the home putting Mum and the other residents in front of the TV all day. ‘Corrosive,’ I think I called it. So self-righteous.

  But now I find it kind of soothing myself, the blandness. I avoid music these days; I just search for voices on the radio, background noise, like I used to hate Dad doing when I was young. I don’t focus on anything – films, TV, books. I used to love all that stuff: murdered women, missing kids, mysteries. But now I’m living it, I’m like the thinnest glass. The panic is never far from the surface.

  When the newsreader says the name, I stop still, my chest freezes. I should have expected this. Deep down, I did. Images cascade in all at once. Close your eyes, breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth, like the therapist said. I’m still loath to admit that this does actually work sometimes. I gulp the lukewarm instant coffee, feeling queasy, and force my attention to the TV.

  Seeing Shawmouth on the national news is still a strange kind of novelty. The reporter stands on the seafront, umbrella straining in the wind, with the beach and a row of shops in the background: a grotty café, a closed newsagent, a fake shop made to look like a homely, welcoming bakery, but it’s just a sticker – a council initiative aimed at getting investors to see the potential in abandoned buildings. It’s a gift to the news lot; they’ll love this gloomy setting. They always tried to make it look like hell on earth here; the kind of place teenage girls disappear.

  The kind of place grown men flee from the first chance they get?

  But the truth is, we aren’t used to national attention here. People keel over with strokes and heart attacks. They die peacefully at a grand old age in their favourite chair. Occasionally there’s a stabbing or a domestic murder – but reporters don’t travel north for those people. I wonder why my thoughts have automatically turned to the way people die? Would Chris being dead be better than him and Kayleigh being alive together somewhere?

  They probably wouldn’t have filmed if it had been a bright, beautiful day – people, especially when they’ve moved away to live in some overpriced beige box in the suburbs down south, love to be smug about what a shithole it is round here, but it can really have the charm of an old Technicolor photo on sunny days.

  ‘Kayleigh Jackson is still missing,’ the newsreader announces. Kayleigh’s young face is up on the screen, a photo she took herself with her phone from a high angle to flatter, pouty. But you can see she’s pretty anyway. Badly back-combed hair with dark roots, floury foundation and too much mascara making spidery lashes that spike out, but the fresh-facedness shines through. The school uniform gets me all over again, my stomach twisting.

  ‘The family of missing schoolgirl Kayleigh Jackson will hold a candlelight vigil next Sunday, on what will be Kayleigh’s fifteenth birthday. The St Augustine’s pupil vanished after 17 July and has not been seen since. Kayleigh’s family has repeatedly appealed to their daughter or anyone who might know anything about her disappearance to get in touch.’

  They’re going to play the video again, I know they are. Shot around a week after Kayleigh went missing. I grip the worktop. I can’t bear to watch it again but it feels cruel to look away.

  Kayleigh’s mum, Janice. I think about her a lot. I’ve never actually met her. Not really. I saw her through the glass once. In the early days, I didn’t know what I was doing, nothing had sunk in. Strung out, I found myself outside Kayleigh’s house, standing at the fence, looking in through the window. I think I wanted to tell her that I was sorry but that it wasn’t true about Chris. It couldn’t be true. Selfish, really. When she saw me, she banged on the window. She burst out of the front door. She was shouting something at me, her face red and twisted like a wrecked car, but all I could hear was white noise. Someone restrained her, an officer came out and shooed me along, shaking his head.

  We don’t know each other, but our lives – mine and Janice’s, mine and Kayleigh’s – have become so intertwined somehow.

  Janice looks tired and drawn, grey-faced. The ends of her sleeves are twisted into the palms of her hands, along with a screwed-up tissue. She shakes with grief, barely able to get her words out and look into the camera. A police officer places a useless, non-committal hand on her forearm as she sobs, the press cameras clicking and flashing.

  ‘We’re not angry,’ she pleads into the camera. ‘Just come home, Kayleigh. We just want you home with us again where you belong,’ she says, before collapsing into sobs again.

  It didn’t take long, a couple of weeks after Kayleigh went missing, for the papers to stick the boot in with Janice too, perhaps growing bored of trying to wring column inches based on nothing out of Chris. All they have is that Chris and Kayleigh both disappeared on the same day. Just that one day, this invisible line linking them together.

  They mentioned Kayleigh’s ‘absent father’, her home in ‘one of Shawmouth’s toughest estates’, and described Janice, completely irrelevantly, as ‘unemployed’. I was ashamed to feel gratitude creeping in, that the heat was off me for a bit.

  The newsreader’s voice pulls me back. ‘Police say they are pursuing multiple lines of enquiry and they’re calling for members of the public with any information about the teen to come forward,’ she says before moving on to the next news item. A row over fracking.

  Multiple lines of enquiry. I roll the term around in my head. It doesn’t give you much hope, does it? That was the term they used then, too, just before Detective Fisher took Chris’s laptop away, and his toothbrush.

  ‘It’s routine for a missing person,’ Fisher had said. They had to investigate all possibilities to find Kayleigh. ‘And your husband, of course,’ she added, as an afterthought.

  Someone must have seen the visit to the house; them taking the items away in sealed, clear bags. Because things got much worse after that – the word was out, the mood had shifted.

  Three

  Friday, 6 November

  As I walk along the seafront, the neon of the arcades is inviting against the grey sky – the childhood excitement of seeing the coloured lights and the cartoonish primary shades of the seaside has never left me. The green fields of Yorkshire, the slick glass city buildings of London don’t make my heart swell in the same way. The slot machines bleep and shimmer as I pass the open fronts of the arcades. I always look in to check, just in case. It’s habit.

  I see Chris everywhere – at night when I sleep, although increasingly the details of his face are slipping away from me. When I quickly dig out a photograph to refresh the image, it feels distant; the features have somehow changed, yet I can’t put my finger on what is different. I see him in the street, lost in a crowd; in the back of a taxi whizzing by; at the supermarket, disappearing around the corner of the next aisle. It’s the shade of his hair, a similar balance of height and weight, a fur-hooded parka coat that he used to wear. Each time, there’s an involuntary surge in me – it’s him, he’s back. Decisions I’ve been unsure I could ever face are resolved in a second: it was all a mistake, there’s an explanation, we can work something out. I still love him and I want to reach out and touch him. But the person always morphs back into themself and I am left bereft all over again, kicking myself for getting swept up once more in what couldn’t be real.

  At first I would often retrace my steps around the town, the same route I took when he first went missing. It’s been a while, though, and now it feels familiar yet strange at the same time, a half-remembered dream. After last night’s firework attack, now the vigil, I almost got back into bed. I’d have stayed there all day again, like before. But something propelled me to get up. Who’s going to stand up for Chris if I don’t?

/>   This time, though, I no longer have the expectation that I’ll run into him, see him coming towards me from a distance, sheepish, loving, sorry. I clung on to that hope at first, but it started to fade then evaporated altogether. I couldn’t hold on to it. The shock of his absence, the gaping hole; it doesn’t subside.

  17 July – the last time Chris was seen, the last time Kayleigh was seen. Once a completely meaningless day. Now forever marked on the mental calendar. Will the people of Shawmouth always remember the date, or will it fade and disappear for everyone but Janice and me?

  I drift into the first arcade and look for the attendant. It’s still early, not even 9 a.m., so it’s fairly quiet, although some people are already here playing the machines. Two boys, their school ties taken off, jab and wrench at a blaring game.

  An old woman perches on a stool in front of one of the fruit machines, slurping out of a polystyrene cup and grabbing coins from an old margarine tub without averting her eyes from the rolling fruit. The lights cast coloured shadows across her face. There’s a man in a striped jumper, cheering his horse on in the Grand National game, tiny plastic horses racing against each other in the encased glass, the winner fixed, pre-programmed. There’s a plastic badge on his jacket; his name is Matty, it tells me. I wait near the machine but he doesn’t look away from the latest race. He shouts and jeers the horses on as if at a real race, but it doesn’t look like his has won, as he kicks the side of the machine and punches his fist against the glass.

  He’s about to put more coins in when he notices me standing there. He looks me up and down, one eyebrow raised. ‘There’s a change machine over there, love.’ His hair is greasy, white flecks of dandruff at the temples.

  ‘I don’t need change. I—’

  ‘Has that new machine swallowed the money again? I’m sorry, love, but it’s not my—’